Telecommunications and computer systems may be deployed in a wide variety of conditions other than an office environment. These systems are often packaged as a collection of modules or circuit boards connected to a primary power bus that distributes power to each of the individual modules or circuit boards. The primary power is generally a DC voltage of a value, such as 48 volts.
A major concern in such a distributed power system is the impact that a single module or circuit board can have on the power system if the module or circuit board were to become faulted, leading to a decrease in the voltage of the primary power bus. This, of course, would adversely affect the operation of the remaining operational modules or circuit boards. This may cause a catastrophic failure of the entire telecommunication or computer system, rather than perhaps the loss of just a single feature or function associated with the faulted module or circuit board.
Presently, distributed power systems attempt to address this problem using two basic strategies. The first strategy is directed to enhancing the transient energy delivery capability of the primary power bus by a direct addition of energy storage capability to the bus itself. This usually takes the form of adding capacitors across the primary power bus that, under a fault condition, may be used to supply energy to the circuit boards in an attempt to maintain the bus voltage.
The second strategy attempts to isolate each of the modules or circuit boards from the primary power bus in the event that the bus voltage droops. In concert with the isolation of the modules the second strategy also provides an energy storage capability associated with each module. This modularized form of energy storage attempts to maintain the voltage at the individual module despite a droop in the primary power bus.
Although the implementation of these two strategies provides some advantage over the use of a distributed power system that offers no fault isolation capability, each of the modules must basically provide a significant portion of its own energy storage capability, since sharing of energy between the modules is effectively foreclosed by the fault isolation circuitry. This modular energy storage capability is therefore used to deal with a fault on another module which may cause the voltage on the primary power bus to droop significantly, and to deal with a fault condition on the module itself. Of course, the dual role required of the energy storage capability necessitates larger capacity energy storage devices thereby adversely affecting, among other things, the overall cost and size of the distributed power system.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a system and method of bolstering a bus voltage associated with a distributed power system that reduces the energy storage required in each module.